Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 23

  He released her hands to slap her cheek, but not hard. The sound hurt more than the blow.

  “Do not speak.” He continued to breathe her in. His leathers shifted against her legs as he shook off his boots, then undid the fastenings to his trousers and pushed them over his hips. He kicked them away, leaving him scorching and bare against her.

  He slid his palms all over her, everywhere he could reach, unhurried as he continued to draw her scent in at her neck, occasionally pebbling her skin when he would run the tips of his teeth against her. He tested the texture of her flesh as she once had the king’s, followed the paths of the fever through her slow-moving blood, cupped her breasts and pricked the nipples with his claws to make her shift against his cock. Pre-come eased his deliberate thrusts along the valley of her spine, but the urgency had dissipated with the rise of the alpha.

  The fingertips on her hips became less threatening as he brought his claws in as far as they could go. The trail he left on the way up her back tickled in its softness, but he forced her head back against his chest before she could laugh. He traced her lips, gazed over her face. His bright eye caught every similarity, every difference; she read both familiarity and curiosity without effort.

  “Take them in.” He abruptly pushed three fingers into her mouth, and she accepted them without protest.

  She ran her tongue along their length, smiling when his hips jerked hard against her. He brought his other hand around to stroke through her folds, drawing wetness over them, as he continued to possess her mouth.

  “Make them nice and wet, little girl. Show me the beast you have always tried to be.”

  When she used her teeth, he curled his fingers against the soft palate. His fingers barely fit between the longest fangs as it was. Though she had not drawn blood, he made no effort to gentle his chastisement, which would have bruised weaker flesh.

  “None of that,” he snapped. “If you will not obey, Asha, I shall have to use only what you have given me.”

  He pulled his fingers from her mouth and relinquished where his other hand had pleasured her.

  Lips against her nape gentled his words. He caught her skin between his teeth when she jumped at fingertips circling behind her cunt.

  “Do not fear,” he said, still holding her in his teeth. “It is even easier for your kind than mine. Has he taught you?”

  Mindful of his command, she shook her head as best as she could.

  His laughter was wicked down her spine. “You will not suffer, strange though the sensations may be at first. Trust me.”

  Her claws scraped over the stone wall as he pressed his wet fingers against her hole. At first, she resisted, tightening herself so he could not push in, but he kissed her again, the slick heat of his mouth melting her. Before she realized it, his fingers entered her. Her saliva eased the way, but it was as though after the initial obstacle, her body welcomed him, swallowed him as completely as her cunt swallowed his cock.

  “What a good little girl,” he whispered.

  Biting her lip was still a new sensation with her new teeth, and she drew blood as he moved his fingers within her, an entirely strange experience that had her gasping. But all too soon, she was moving against his fingers, using the wall to push herself back, chasing the fullness that pulled against the emptiness where she was more accustomed to sensation.

  He withdrew his fingers from her as abruptly as he had from her mouth and without warning brought his cock to her hole. She hissed, her teeth clicking together, head shaking from side to side, but not in denial. The captain held her still with a harder bite at the nape of her neck as he pushed himself into her.

  Asha kept expecting pain, but even when it came, arousal had twisted so closely that she could barely recognize it. Her emptiness ached all the more because he filled her elsewhere.

  She took her hand from the wall to slither her touch through her folds, to stroke the wet flesh, to sink her fingers where she strained for satisfaction despite the thick cock stimulating her to satisfaction of a different kind.

  “No.” He grabbed her wrist and slapped it back against the wall. “Your pleasure belongs to me. Only I can fulfill it.” His whole body was flush against hers, his erection terrifyingly intimate where he shoved himself in. Asha scrabbled at the stone, but despite her claws could find no purchase.

  “Captain…”

  His next stroke had her whimpering into the stone.

  “My name. You never use my name.”

  More accustomed to honorifics for men, his name tasted odd in an already contorted mouth, but it escaped in a moan nonetheless. “Rafe.”

  He sank his teeth, every inch of every last one, into her shoulder to muffle the wolf’s roar even as he buried himself over and over within her ass.

  Her claws broke through the stone, but she had no grip on her own pleasure, her climax a wild storm out of control with nothing to clasp, nothing to taste, nothing to push it higher or longer. He fucked her through an orgasm that knew not where to coil, fading and intensifying in turns, until her eyes pricked with tearless pain.

  He returned the favor, her name a growl that shivered through her as his hips jerked with virile power that would have once crushed her bones—how he must have been holding back even that night that the king had lured him, that he only now showed how terrible his strength, how terrible the pleasure he wrought.

  “I would still have you as one of my own if I could,” the captain said. Her blood dripped slowly from his lips, too thick and dark to stream. He seemed not to fear becoming like her by swallowing her blood, which meant he had tasted the king as well. “But I can only become one of yours.”

  He used his wolf’s tongue to clean his mouth and chin, sparing none of the blood he had pierced from her, although even now the bite mark had stitched almost completely together to leave no scar. Her old scars remained, but it appeared she would gain no more.

  “One of mine?” Words came slowly to her in the aftermath, with his cock still deep inside her and pleasure bursting like bubbles in freshly poured wine.

  “Less formal than when I promised myself to the king.” He eased her arms down but did not relinquish her body against his. “My blood contract to you. The pack is yours to command at his side.”

  “I never demanded your fealty, captain.”

  “I know.” He interlocked his large fingers with hers from behind. “I do not offer it freely. You took it by force long ago, though not with intention.”

  “Should you not speak to your pack of airstrikes?” she asked when he still had not moved from covering her like a mantle.

  “Yes, I should.” He eased his cock from her, but instead of withdrawing, he drew her down to the wooden floors with him, enveloped by his body. “No point now. If she comes tonight, we would never be ready. If she comes after sunset tomorrow, we may still prepare through the day. No more, Asha. Stay the moment. Please.”

  11

  A nudge roused her from blood sleep.

  “Asha.” Callina sat up in bed, covers around her waist. The fire in the hearth had long since gone dim. Neither Asha nor Callina needed it for warmth anymore, and hardly for light. “The drapes are open.”

  When Asha and Callina had fallen asleep, there had still been daylight. Neither of them would have opened the drapes.

  “Be wary,” Asha whispered back. She pulled on the fitted, simple, black gown that she had entered bed in, then crept along the carpet to silence her footsteps.

  The roses across from the window had been deprived of blood, the crimson centers all but spent, but they opened toward the moonlight, of which she had also lately deprived them. Iron chains broke the light, and the knobs were bound from the inside. They rattled against the strain.

  Murial stared through the window and the drapes she could have only opened with magic. Stained lips widened into a terrifying smile filled with sharper teeth than resided in Asha’s mouth—as though Murial had more of the dragon in her despite the fulfillment of her appetite
s.

  “Hello, Grayling. Do you and your wolf bitch play?”

  Asha tore her gaze from the swirling black tinged with red that filled Murial’s eyes.

  “Callina, do not meet her gaze. Come with me now.” Asha grabbed her by the arm as Callina transformed midstride. They breached her bedroom door to the hall. “Send out the call.”

  Callina’s howl defied the tapestries on the walls and carpets lining the stone floors. Asha’s keen ears detected echoes bouncing through the ceilings of the rose window hall and around the curve of the king’s corridor. Other howls rose to meet the warning, sending it through the castle and up the winding stairs to towers and turrets, through doors and windows.

  At the sound of the call, the servants would be descending into the bowels of the castle, where they could not be lured by thrall as long as the king and queen still held dominion over the castle’s loyalty. The wolves would guard the openings and the towers from the interior.

  At the rose window hall, Callina should have parted from Asha to join the rest of the troops, but she refused to leave Asha’s side.

  “Callina, you have to go. Your pack has a place for you. The king will come for me.”

  “Sorry, love.” Lysan shook his dense mane, talismans and the spears bound to his back clinking. “The alpha does not have a choice but to stand with his wolves, but the king agreed with us that we are the best to protect your back, even if you fly above us. Alpha assented. She will not abandon you. We will not abandon you.”

  He shifted almost all the way into his full wolf shape, maintaining enough of his fingers that he could wield the spear if needed. Callina had chosen to remain unencumbered, her lips pulled away from teeth extended to their full length, as were her claws. Dangerous though it was, she intended to fight her adversaries up close.

  “Asha.” The king floated into the hall, his eyes burning in the black that had seeped into the skin around them as well.

  “She did nothing but attempt to frighten us at my window. Does she have power as esoteric as your own?” Asha asked. “She moved the curtains without opening the window or breaking the chains.”

  The king lowered his boots to the floor. “She might have encountered magic in her journeys and seduced her power from a sorcerer, as I once did.”

  “I have no magic, my lord, but for the power within the monster I have become.”

  “Iron will aid your efforts—it is the only protection against magic, limited though it might be. It is why I do not let it cage my bed or my winter roses.” He removed a pair of unbound shackles from his robes, delicate rather than thick, made for the slightness of slender wrists. They latched but did not lock. He hissed slightly as he encircled her wrists with them, but the iron left no marks upon his hands. “It will not abhor the magic of your being, my love, as the sun abhors us and as silver abhors the wolves. But it might protect you from spellbound magic. Let it at least lend its aid if the woman decides to strike at you with forces she should not have shown she knows how to harness.”

  Then he unbuckled one of the swords around his waist and wrapped the belt around hers instead. The hilt had been embedded with smoothed garnets that seemed brighter against her skin and her black gown. “I would teach you how best to use this, but we have not the time, and I trust your resourcefulness. Steel has always suited you. I hope to see you in red again when this battle has been won.”

  “You need not lie to me.” But Asha wrapped her fingers around the sword’s hilt. “I have accepted death—as long as I bring her with me.”

  The king cradled her head in his hands, stroking the claws of his thumbs along her cheeks. “I will see to it that you will not come to that.”

  “Promise me nothing.”

  He interrupted her with a kiss, only his lips upon hers, but unmistakably a seal. “You have not yet lived twenty years, Ashling. I have lived centuries.”

  “So has she.”

  “I have lived more. I see years beyond this battle, my love. I have slaughtered armies with nothing but my sword, my teeth, and my thrall. I did not creep from house to house to amass my subjects as she did. Her way was just as effective, an insidious plague upon the kingdoms of the north. But I never had to hide to conquer. Trust me, Asha—her victory is far from assured.”

  Asha rested her cheek against his chest. “Her contagion may outwit your complacency.”

  “It may. But she, too, suffers from inflated self-importance. She, too, is complacent, or else she would never have taken you, nor would she have given me time.”

  Dragon shrieks from the exterior drew their attention to the rose windows, where shadows swarmed over the panes. In the next moment, glass showered to the floor, pierced with claws and fists that reached through the iron frames, through the chains. The dragons screamed through the openings, this time in fury at being thwarted.

  The king hooked his arm around Asha’s waist, but he was otherwise still, unfazed despite the ear-splitting noise. “They may reach all they like and scream their displeasure. It will not grant them access to my castle. Let them tear the chains away. Walls still obstruct their efforts. As long as my wolves’ will remains as iron as their protection,” he added softly.

  He passed his gaze from the windows with pain and turned instead to the wolves and Asha. “To the gardens.”

  They smelled the smoke long before they arrived at the courtyard. The wolves’ noses wrinkled from it, and Asha divined its meaning before the sight of the flames licking glass and copper. The glass and copper would likely survive.

  The roses would not.

  The white petals blackened and curled into smoldering ash—the first time she had ever seen the king’s winter roses capable of death.

  Wrapping his fingers around the wrought-iron gate, the king watched his roses burn. Had the gate been made of anything other than iron, Asha believed he would have warped it into unrecognizable form.

  The king flung the gates open. The four of them stepped out into the garden. Lysan quickly closed the gates again and wrapped iron chains around the latch. Asha would have warned them to leave an escape route for themselves, but Lysan acted too quickly, and she recognized that the wolves had not come with her to escape.

  The king approached the fiery remnants of his roses, his claws preventing fists, but his face contorted into that of the monster despite all the blood he had consumed.

  “You like to attack from the shadows, Murial.” His voice reached all four corners of the gardens, above the crackling and roaring of the flames. “It is an intelligent way to strike. It amassed you an army. It earned you your centuries of life beyond death. It earned you fallen kingdoms. But if you intend to fell this kingdom, you could burn the villages before you could burn the roses and live to see another full moon.”

  “You and your roses, Cyric.” Like the king’s, her voice echoed across the stone and deadened grass, impossible to pinpoint. “Their thorns cannot even pierce our skin. Why choose such weak vessels for your affection?”

  “Do we still speak of roses?”

  Her laughter rippled around them. “I am not so easily lured. I have grown beyond the stakes you threaded me around long ago. But you, my dear man, are much more easily lured. I knew that all I had to do was threaten your precious roses, of one name or another.”

  “Neither you nor your dragons are welcome in my home. Even if you can step foot within my castle, you cannot invite your children, and you are no match for a whole army.”

  “A whole army quaking with fear inside stone walls? I am more than capable. Besides, I do not need to kill them to let my dragons in. I need only kill you.”

  “And I do not need to kill your whole army in order to render their numbers into chaos. I need only kill you,” the king replied. “For your war upon my roses and wives, I shall do so without hesitation. You should have known better.”

  “My dragons will feast upon your flesh before you even dare to unleash your wolves to their teeth.”

  Asha raised her ga
ze to writhing castle walls. Dragons crawled down the stone, their white skin rendering them wraiths in the darkness, alit only with the rose-fed fire.

  “My lord,” Asha said, so quietly that her words had to travel on the breeze. Her hand on his shoulder drew his attention to the castle walls above them.

  “Go,” he whispered.

  Asha would have protested, but Callina and Lysan darted forward, and Callina pushed her head against Asha’s side so that she had no choice but to stumble in the direction they herded her. They put the fire between them and the creeping dragons. Callina pushed herself upright but stayed crouched, eyes narrowing.

  The king lifted himself from the ground, his robes flowing around him like smoke, his teeth daggers in his mouth as he hissed the unintelligible language Asha had only heard from him once, like thousands of bats whispering at once.

  His thrall gave the dragons pause, confusion in their reflective eyes.

  Murial emerged from the shadows of the rampart, her black gown translucent and loose over her body to give her a creature’s range of motion, her own teeth bared but nowhere near as large as the king’s.

  “Mine,” she snarled. “Your words will not take them from me.”

  Lysan howled.

  The king flew back, robes whipping like wings, as fire rained down from the towers and turrets above the crawling walls. Iron-tipped and flaming arrows struck shoulders, backs, and skulls, pierced flanks and wings. Many of the wolves were decades distant from their old training, but attuned senses clearly adjusted for inexperience, because many of the arrows struck true. The dragons proved as flammable as the roses, burning faster than if they were human.

  Murial called the uninjured dragons to the air with her as others collapsed onto the gravel path where Asha, the king, and the wolves had stood.

  The king followed them toward the clouds, shedding his robes to give the dragons nothing to snag upon and to enhance his agility moving among them. The robes fell upon one of the creatures that had caught flame. It gave the fire more fuel to burn, setting the whole dragon alight.